Educating for Sustainability

Back in New Zealand, the government was trying to turn fantasy into reality, as the success of the film Lord of the Rings meant the country was recognised as home to the beautiful and wild Middle Earth. To nurture a society and economy that would both preserve and complement such natural beauty, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released See change: Learning and education for sustainability.31 The report looked at the whole range of educative institutions and activities, from formal education through to religions, the media and the private sector. Looking beyond symptoms and the role of individuals, and focusing on underlying causes and systems, the report attempts to raise the level of debate and stimulate action towards learning to live more sustainably. "There will be heated debate", claims the Commissioner, Dr Morgan Williams, "because this learning will challenge strongly held beliefs about our social and economic systems."32 Arguing for a paradigm shift, he lays the blame on "our dominant value systems [which] are at the very heart of unsustainable practices. Making progress towards better ways of living therefore needs to be a deeply social, cultural, philosophical and political process - not simply a technical or economic one. Technical and economic mechanisms will certainly be key parts of the process. However, they will not come into play unless we, as a society, are prepared to openly and honestly debate the ways that our desired qualities of life can be met. That is why there must be a vastly expanded focus on education for sustainability".33

Two thousand and four also seems to be the year for a big emphasis on the role of business school education in meeting this challenge - in publication terms, at least. Greenleaf Publishing is promoting Teaching for sustainability: From theory to practice, edited by Chris Galea, and due out in May. The Wiley journal Business Strategy and the Environment34 is currently calling for papers for a special issue on a similar topic.

The stated rationale for the former is once again the increasing incidence of corporate governance scandals that has brought "the role of business schools in producing the managers of today - and tomorrow...into sharp focus".35 Teaching business sustainability promises to begin to reveal the state of the art in teaching business sustainability worldwide, with a focus on a wide mix of supposedly successful and leading edge teaching practices and tools. Such approaches share an experiential and often a team-based element, linking theory to practice. The argument for experiential approaches or simulations is that "whenever possible educators need to link the learning to the students' immediate and pressing 'real-world' realities [said to apply] equally to undergraduates or high-level executives".36

The book also presents the case for sustainability education requiring holistic and interdisciplinary learning. Interdisciplinarity is often problematic within traditional business school departmental and career structures, let alone in reaching across to our colleagues in ecology, engineering and biology and geography. The co-author of this column has not made herself popular reminding business school colleagues that various physical and social sciences are way ahead of ourselves in considering sustainability matters - and indeed that students from outside the business school are a welcome addition to classes on these topics.

Both the book and the call for papers alluded to above do promise some critique. For after all, we are not there yet with sustainability - and nor most obviously is business. It's what we might consider the mainstream business and the mainstream business school classroom that has to change most radically. The tendency for us to celebrate the leading edge, while healthy in itself, must not be allowed to mask the scale of the task and the wide range of expertise that must be brought to bear in solving the problems before us.